VISIONIS is a five-year research project running from October 2021 to September 2026 and supported by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council. The project sets out to write a cultural history of vision in Early Islam. It addresses what is one of the most understudied but highly controversially discussed topics; Muslim attitudes towards visuality in the first centuries of Islam. Visuality as a comprehensive term denotes the interplay of discourses, practices and artefacts connected to vision, sight and seeing. How people conceptualize the sense of sight? How do they experience and understand sight and vision? How do they use and produce visual images or imageries? Muslim approaches to visual culture and visibility differ according to historical, geographical, social and intellectual contexts. Nevertheless, the wide-spreading idea of Islam as being an antipode to other visual cultural traditions such as the European goes widely uncontested. VISIONIS wishes to offer the possibility of reviewing perceptions of Islam in general and of the visual culture of Early Islam in particular. It studies fundamental but neglected aspects of the Qur’an and Early Islamic writings, and develops a holistic perspective on the use and meaning of the visual practices of seeing and concepts of the sense of sight in Early Islamic textual and material culture.

 

We argue that the Qur’an is providing a key witness for our knowledge of the scope of visual strands in the Late Antique epistemic space and its active transformation by the emerging new religious community of Muslims. We assume that Early Islamic exegetical, theological, legal, literary and historiographical texts and Early Islamic artistic production attest to the hitherto unstudied adjustment, conceptualization and calibration of the various Qur’anic visual elements in combination with local-temporal trends.

 

VISIONIS develops a holistic and interdisciplinary perspective on the origins and development of visuality in Early Islam. It studies the mobility and entanglement of four trajectories of major elements that constitute visuality in the Qur'an the theological conceptualization of the sense of sight, the anthropocentric discourse about the desire to see, the rhetorical use of visual language and the use and establishment of images.

Speech and Scripture: Visuality in the Qur’an and Early Islamic Exegesis (Hannelies Koloska)

Hannelies Koloska focusses on discourses of seeing and visual elements in the Qur’anic text. She studies the theological concepts of seeing, anthropocentric discourses, visionary experiences and visual rhetoric, image-text relation. Special weight is placed on the close connection between theological content, didactic purpose, and literary expression in the Qur’an as well as on a presumable change of visualities between oral speech and written text.

How Qur’anic visual rhetoric and its references to images are interpreted or disregarded in early Qur’an commentaries is studied in a subsequent, yet overlapping step. The early development of exegetical traditions offers a variety of methods for establishing meaning to Qur’anic verses.  The development of various religious groups is also taken into account and their explanations of visual aspects of the Qur’an is examined accordingly. Thus, the effect of concurrent establishments of religious orthodoxies and formations of protocols of gaze is taken into consideration as fundamental for processes of knowledge transfer and interpretation.

Visualized Images and Concepts: Visuality in Islamic Art and Architecture (Inbal Kol)

Inbal Kol is exploring the correlation between the artistic expressions in early Islamic art and architecture and trajectories of visuality in the Qur'an, Early Islamic texts. She studies the significance of theological and legal concepts of seeing in the establishment of new forms of artistic expressions, reflects upon desired visionary experiences in the creation of spaces, and studies the translation of texts into images and the creation of visual agents for textual rhetoric.

The Accountable Eye: Visuality in Islamic Law and Theology

This subproject examines theological conceptualizations of the sense of sight. It focusses on the entwined development of theological notions of the human body and concepts of vision. The eyes, as any other part of the body, are objects subject to cultural and religious appropriation and construction. Thus, conceptualizations of the body affect concepts of sight and vice versa.

The Travelling Eye: Visuality in Islamic Historiography

This subproject examines how the aspiration of vision and the desire to see the visible and the invisible is described, valued and expanded in Islamic historiographical narrations in recurrence to Qur’anic accounts. The human desire to see as driving factor for imaginative and factual travels, for the creation of spaces and visits of places and people resulted in various accounts of vision and travel. Hence, the subproject sheds light on the theologization, popularization and diversification of discourses of vision and travelling.

Visual Rhetoric: Visuality in Arabic Poetry and Islamic Rhetoric

This subproject takes account of rhetorical practices of visualization in Arabic poetry and Early Islamic rhetorical works. Both literary genres – poetry and oratory – constitute the most famous types of public expression in Early Islam. The project asks about the use of visual rhetoric in poetry and early Islamic public speeches and its relation to the Qur'an and will give valuable clues about the range and intensity in which references to the sense of sight, images of beholding and visual imagery were used.